The One Downside of Gender Equality In Sports

As a female journalist who has covered women’s sports for years, I have long dreamed of the day that female athletes would demand the level of media attention traditionally reserved for men.

Now that day is finally here—and it’s a lot less satisfying than I imagined.

The arrival of a dynamite WNBA rookie class, headlined by the sensational Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, has prompted an explosion of coverage of women’s basketball. But—and perhaps I should have anticipated this—the surge in popularity has come at a cost. Ill-informed male sports analysts are suddenly chiming in about the league and its players, offering narratives untethered to facts and occasionally making me long for the days when the WNBA largely flew under the radar.

Much of the discourse revolves around Clark, the former University of Iowa star who became the all-time college scoring leader this season and is one of the most remarkable players the sport has ever seen. A persistent theme has emerged that WNBA players, particularly the veterans, are jealous of Clark and resent the attention she has been getting, when they should be groveling at her feet. A few weeks ago, for example, the Hall of Fame former player and beloved commentator Charles Barkley accused WNBA players of being “petty” and declared, “Y’all should be thanking that girl for getting y’all ass private charters, all the money and visibility she’s bringing to the WNBA.”

[Alex Kirshner: Caitlin Clark is just the beginning]

That narrative escalated over the weekend during a matchup between Clark’s team, the Indiana Fever, and the Chicago Sky, which features Reese, who has been Clark’s nemesis since they faced off in the NCAA championship game two years ago. During Saturday’s game, Reese’s teammate Chennedy Carter leveled Clark with a body check during a stoppage in play. Reese, who was on the bench at the time, leaped up to applaud the cheap shot. (The Fever went on to win.)

Carter and Clark had been mixing it up throughout the game, but things should never have escalated to that point. The hit was dirty and should have been flagged as a flagrant foul in the moment rather than upgraded after a postgame review. Reese’s reaction, while perhaps unsurprising given her long-running personal rivalry with Clark, was inappropriate. But instead of analyzing the incident for what it was—intense competition gone wrong—the male punditocracy rushed to assign collective blame to the legions of Clark’s supposed haters around the league.

The former NBA player turned analyst Austin Rivers, for example, posted a video ripping female players for their lack of gratitude. “If you girls were Destiny’s Child, she would be Beyoncé,” he said. Instead of hating on Clark, he added, WNBA players needed to “appreciate her. It’s about that time. We need to grow up and move on. Pay respect.”

In men’s sports, of course, tough defense, physical play, trash talk, and personal rivalries are celebrated, applauded, and marketed. NBA history is filled with stories of personal grudges, including some that featured plenty of dirty play and have lasted well past athletes’ playing days. (See: Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas.) These stories are embraced and told with affection. In fact, one of the criticisms that some fans have of today’s NBA is that the players have gotten too friendly and the game itself too soft. When it comes to hard-nosed play against Clark, however, male pundits seem unable to see women as fierce competitors. They just see mean girls.

(Reese herself has been on the wrong end of some “Welcome to the league” fouls, most recently a throat-grab body slam by the Connecticut Sun’s Alyssa Thomas. “They don’t give a damn if I’m a rookie,” Reese said afterward. “They’re not supposed to be nice to me.”)

As more and more male pundits opine on women’s basketball, some of the analysis is just plain cringeworthy. In April, in the quarterfinals of the NCAA tournament, Clark put up 41 points and 12 assists in a decisive victory over Louisiana State University, the defending champion. After the game, the NBA Hall of Fame player Paul Pierce offered scintillating analysis on the Fox Sports 1 talk show Undisputed. “I’mma just keep it 100 with you,” Pierce said. “We saw a white girl from Iowa do it to a bunch of Black girls. That gained my respect.” His fellow panelists nodded in agreement.

A white woman dominating Black opponents in women’s college hoops sure does sound remarkable—unless you know anything at all about the history of the sport. Women’s college ball has been littered with dominant white players. In 2021, the University of Connecticut star Paige Bueckers, a favorite to be the top pick in next year’s WNBA draft, was the first freshman woman to win the John R. Wooden Award, given to the best player in the nation. Breanna Stewart, the reigning WNBA MVP, won four straight national championships and three national player-of-the-year awards at UConn. The NCAA women’s record holder for most career points before Clark was Kelsey Plum, a white point guard who now plays for the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces.

[Jemele Hill: Women’s college basketball is a worthy investment]

At least Pierce’s comment, however ignorant, was meant to be complimentary. The same can’t be said of the more recent avalanche of male punditry, which drips with condescension and stereotypes about women’s behavior. After Clark’s team lost its first several games of the season, for example, some male analysts suggested that the league should be rigged to allow Clark to succeed, for the benefit of the sport’s popularity.

“The WNBA is playing this all wrong,” the NBA journeyman Jeff Teague said on his podcast, Club 520. The league, he said, should mimic professional wrestling, pulling its punches against Clark. “It’s supposed to be like WWE. Y’all are supposed to play hard against her but let her kill.”

The Fox Sports radio host Colin Cowherd made a similar argument on the air a few weeks ago. The WNBA had erred, in his view, by making Clark play against strong competition to begin the season. “So they finally have this moment,” Cowherd said. “Don’t put Caitlin Clark up in the first four games against New York twice and Connecticut twice, the best defensive teams.”

What Cowherd may not realize is that the WNBA has only 12 teams, and the top eight qualify for the postseason. There just aren’t a lot of weak links. Clark’s team is one of the few, which is why they’ve had the top pick in the draft the past two years. In the WNBA, just like in men’s sports, the best college players tend to have to take their lumps for a few years on a lousy team. No one was saying that the NBA should go easy on Victor Wembanyama’s lowly San Antonio Spurs this past season.

Now, in fairness, Cowherd wasn’t saying that the WNBA should pamper Clark just because she’s a woman. In fact, he claimed, men’s professional leagues pull these kinds of shenanigans all the time. The NFL purposely gave the Chicago Bears an easy beginning-of-season schedule this year, he said, so that their new quarterback, the No. 1 draft pick, Caleb Williams, could get acclimated before facing tough competition or appearing on national TV. Likewise, Cowherd said, when Major League Soccer wanted to make sure that Lionel Messi ended up on a major market team, it ignored salary-cap rules so that Miami could sign him to a big contract.

This analysis was even sillier than his WNBA commentary. The Bears will be on prime-time national TV in the second week of the season, facing the Houston Texans, a playoff team that won its division last year. As for Messi, the MLS has set aside non-salary-capped slots for star international players since 2007. So at least Cowherd didn’t limit his wacky, fact-free theorizing to just women. Maybe that’s progress. Maybe the fact that the WNBA is finally being subjected to the same absurd, often ignorant debates as men’s sports is just what equality looks like.

Still, it rankles. When I hosted ESPN’s SportsCenter in 2017, any time I flubbed a name or statistic, legions of viewers would declare on social media that it was proof that women shouldn’t be discussing men’s sports. Men, by contrast, are allowed to laugh and even brag about how little they know about the women’s game. Last month, the ESPN talk-show host and former NFL punter Pat McAfee posted from the sideline of a New York Liberty game: “Has this Liberty team ever lost?” he wrote on X. “This might be the greatest team assembled of all time.”

I’m glad McAfee was enjoying “the W,” as the WNBA is often called. The Liberty are indeed a very good team. So good, in fact, that they made the WNBA finals last year—where they got smoked by the Aces, who are going for their third straight WNBA title this year. So, yes, this Liberty team has lost. When the WNBA analyst Carolyn Peck called him out, McAfee replied sarcastically, “I and my show will not speak about the W until we know everything about it.”

Look, he might have a point. Perhaps longtime women’s-sports fans should stop holding male pundits to even the most basic standards of knowledgeability. I mean, we wouldn’t want to appear ungrateful that men are finally paying attention. That would just be petty.